Maria Teresa Santos

Maria Teresa Santos is a PhD candidate in migration at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), University of Lisbon. With nearly 20 years experience managing European Union and Portuguese cooperation projects mostly in Portuguese Speaking African Countries and East-Timor and a MSc in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London she now turns her focus to the European continent and specifically to the relation between migration and development within the European Union space.

In her PhD research she takes as her point of departure the destruction of the rigid line separates the underdeveloped global south from the developed global north by placing the migration and development debate within the uneven geographical development of the European Union. In particular she pretends to research the contribution of Portuguese migrants in Germany to the development of Portugal and its regions. Using the lenses of critical realism, social space theory and political economy analysis she pretends to reflect on the effects of migrant’s action producing nature and space and the way this interacts with notions of development. She takes a multi-scalar, multi-sited and comparative approaches as methodological options to pursue research in the uneven global north.